"Doubt entails self-examination because a check on the plausibility of your beliefs and attitudes is a check on all the constitutents of the slef. Explanations of why your falsely supposed "X" includes your motives for believing "X" (your desire to maintain a relationship, your impulse to be charitable, your goal of becoming a better person); the causes of your believing "X" (your early training, your having drunk too much, your innate disposition to to optimism); and your objective reasons for believing "X" (it's consistent with your other beliefs, it explains the most data, it's inductively confirmed, people you respect believe it). . . ."

Adrian Piper, Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self-Awareness. At p. 87 in The Citizen Artist, The Critical Press, 1998. ISBN: 1883831-10-5

Now, that sounds a little different from our traditional sociological explanations, doesn't it? But notice how much easier it is to read and take notes, when you compile the information into a table like that below. You don't have to get fancy. When there's lots of information, crammed all together into a long and unforgiving paragraph, see if you can't break it into levels, as I did here. Notes like this will make the material much easier to study, if you've got to commit some or all of the information to memory. It will also make it easier to find things quickly in an open-book test, Heaven forfend.

Here is one of Adrian Piper's concluding paragraphs about our denial of that which contradicts our beliefs, wherever we got them from and for whatever reasons:

"The result is blindness to the genuine needs of other people, coupled with the arrogant and dangerous conviction that you understand those needs better than they do; and a consequent inability to respond to those needs politically in genuinely effective ways.

The antidote, I suggest, is confrontation of the sinner with the evidence of the sin; the rationalizations; the subconscious defense mechanisms; the strategies of avoidance, denial, dismissal and withdrawal that signal, on the one hand, the retreat of the self to the protective enclave of ideology, on the other hand, precisely the proof of subjectivity and fallibility that the ideologue is so anxious to ignore.

The success of the antidote increases with the specificity of the confrontation. . . . "

Adrian Piper, Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self-Awareness. At p. 91 in The Citizen Artist, The Critical Press, 1998. ISBN: 1883831-10-5

Your Table of Note Taking:

Create a table for your notes on this paragraph.

Consider the following: Piper speaks of the harm that comes of our denial of what contradicts our beliefs. She spaks of the antidote. And she speaks of the specificity of the antidote.e

Within the discussion of harm she speaks of arrogance, of danger, and of inability.

Within the discussion of antidote she speaks of confrontation with: evidence, rationalizations, subconscious defense mechanisms, strategies of avoidance, denial, withdrawal.

Within the discussion of the success of the antidote she speaks of the importance of specificity.

Notice that using sentences for notes is not as clear to review as a table.